Salvia is reality?

[sjlowhay]

i haven't had strange hallucinations from it in a long time, but i smoke leaf with a bic lighter.. just a bowl.. sometimes enough to get me laughing away. altered though process, makes my senses feel refreshed, nice if i go out for a walk. ah, the sweet smell of car exhaust. a little music enhancement too

i guess i never 'broke through' never got any visual hallucination, just tactile, dejavu, getting pulled and 'strapped to the wall' 'becoming and feeling like objects'

i'm left handed but i cannot remember which direction this pulling took place

 

[psood0nym]

So far as I remember I usually feel a pull to the right and back and I'm right handed. One friend said he gets pulled straight back. Another friend feels the pull fluctuate, giving him a roller coaster like sensation. Salvia definitely has "gravity" effects, but even if most people get a pull to the left I doubt there is any consistent correlation with handedness. I agree about the problem with drawing parallels from lay understandings of theoretical physics (whose more "metaphysical" theories like the "brane" types alluded to here change a lot over time) to something so varied as the salvia experience, themes or not. The two-dimensional effects are prevalent in a lot of reports, but they're certainly not consistent enough to entertain the notion that everyone is going to a world with stable features. I've had trips where two-dimensionality was a major theme (the wallpaper slide story given earlier), and trips where it played no role at all.

I disagree that the salvia experience is too alien to derive insights from it. I used it to arrive at the basic tenants of panexperientialism before I knew panexperientialism was a philosophy. I based my conclusion partially on the observation that it's strange that an experience so radically divergent from consensus reality as salvia's should be possible at all if conscious awareness is a pattern (which we'd expect to be fairly specific and easy to disrupt into non-consciousness patterns). I concluded that since the salvia experience is possible it is better accounted for by assuming consciousness is inherent in matter and organized and unified in us through bioelectical patterns in that matter rather than it is by the view that it is just the pattern (such as could be reproduced in computer chips, such that it would be possible to "download" your consciousness i.e. panexperientialism suggests that is unlikely to be possible). This view supports an interpretation of conscious experience that is much more resistant to disruption and alteration such as during the radical alteration of consciousness in the salvia experience, since the physical constitution of brain matter is more durable than a specific bioelectric pattern or narrow range of similar patterns constituting consciousness alone. So, ironically, rather than the alieness of the salvia experience preventing me from drawing insights from it, it was in contemplating that alieness itself that I derived insight.

There's other things too, such as intuiting the experience of visual agnosia in the famous letter posting experiments with patient D.F. This is due to the fact that a person who is effectively blind due to damage to the dorsal visual stream through the brain but not the ventral, or vice versa (as are sufferers of the condition), as one is effectively blind in the midst of a salvia vision, can nevertheless post a letter through a vertical slot without issue, just as I can walk around without bumping into furniture or walls without being aware of there presence (though I understand that isn't the case for some!). In fact, saliva is probably the most insightful substance I've used, specifically because of its alieness.

 

[DwayneHoover]

Philosopher David Chalmers and some physicists think that consciousness is some inherent property of matter or space-time, like mass and energy, not some "bio-computer" program that via totally never-explained mechanisms give rise to an internal subjective "sensation" of what it is "like" to "be" them.

Why should certain configurations of electrical activity in a bag of neurons have an "internal subjective" feeling to them? ABSURD! Does a certain arrangement of furniture in my living room have its own internal "feeling" of what it is like to "be" that arrangement? Is it sad when it "dies" and becomes another arrangement? Is the old arrangement angry and remorseful at me for killing it? Does the new arrangement feel "furniture joy" at having been born?

Like, assuming that evolution managed to "invent" consciousness by designing brain structures that magically "generate" it, is when you think about it totally preposterous.

Evolution did not invent light. It did however invent eyeballs and retina's etc to take advantage of photons and their ability to interact with certain chemical and molecular structures in the retina. Likewise, it did not invent subjective consciousness, but it did invent the brain mechanism to capture, amplify and focus it, thus giving us our individual subjective "Qualia", and put it to use as a tool to vastly increase the odds of the transmission of the DNA.

 

[SKL]

I can buy into that, more or less.

much further down the rabbit hole and you lost me, tho

 

[Big_Donnie]

Salvia feels like a waste of time to me personally because even with the same amount and type smoked I've only gotten a memorable experience one time out of about ten or eleven. Every time it just makes my body feel like it's been sucked to the Earth's core either to the straight right or left, and my vision seems like it only works in flashes of white light.

That being said, the one memorable experience I had was insane. It's the only time I've had what I feel like were actual "hallucinations." I was sitting in the back of a truck (not moving, just to clarify) and took a huge hit. Well, for me it was huge since I'm not much of a smoker. As soon as I exhaled I saw these disks flying from the right side of my visual field and they were literally creating the landscape in front of me from left to right. Once they finished making it as far to the right as I could see, I felt totally sober. I remember pulling my feet up from dangling off the tailgate of the truck because I felt as if one of the disks had hit my foot and I had fucked up what they were trying to do.

And it tastes like total shit, that's always a negative.

 

[~_Hiss_~]

I have learned, painfully much about the brain and it is far from a bag of electrical activity. memories and thoughts stored at synapses, by the trillions (1000 for each brain cell). Not discrediting the physicists DH refers to, but just adding another bit to our puzzle of life.

Its nice to read arguments that are interesting, some in this thread are despite my initial reaction (which remains) against salvia showing a "true"reality. Much better than religious debate which I admit to provoking on youtube sometimes. At least most of us here agree on evolution.

 

[psood0nym]

Philosopher David Chalmers and some physicists think that consciousness is some inherent property of matter or space-time, like mass and energy, not some "bio-computer" program that via totally never-explained mechanisms give rise to an internal subjective "sensation" of what it is "like" to "be" them.

Why should certain configurations of electrical activity in a bag of neurons have an "internal subjective" feeling to them? ABSURD! Does a certain arrangement of furniture in my living room have its own internal "feeling" of what it is like to "be" that arrangement? Is it sad when it "dies" and becomes another arrangement? Is the old arrangement angry and remorseful at me for killing it? Does the new arrangement feel "furniture joy" at having been born?

Like, assuming that evolution managed to "invent" consciousness by designing brain structures that magically "generate" it, is when you think about it totally preposterous.

Evolution did not invent light. It did however invent eyeballs and retina's etc to take advantage of photons and their ability to interact with certain chemical and molecular structures in the retina. Likewise, it did not invent subjective consciousness, but it did invent the brain mechanism to capture, amplify and focus it, thus giving us our individual subjective "Qualia", and put it to use as a tool to vastly increase the odds of the transmission of the DNA.

I've only read of Chalmers, never his work. I read that he once wrote of a thermostat having subjective experience and dismissed him (though to his credit, I've read he's abandoned that conception of panexperientialism).

The conception I have differentiates between "compound" and "aggregate" psychophysical entities. An example of a compound entity is a molecule, with properties that arise from the spatial configuration of its atoms. Likewise, the arrangement of carbon atoms in a diamond are thought in this conception to have a different subjective being than the arrangement of carbon atoms in graphite. A chair, in contrast, is an "aggregate" entity. It has no subjective being AS a chair, rather it is a hodgepodge of compound entities: the iron atoms in the nails, the various organic molecules that compose the wood, etc.. To address my dismissal of Chalmers: it's because a thermostat, despite having a logical function, is clearly an aggregate entity i.e. it has no unified experience.

The brain is a very special "compounder" of compound entities, and that is what explains its complex unified experience -- the experience we enjoy as self-aware beings. That is, it unifies the subjective experience of the compound molecules that brain matter consists of into complex organized patterns through the organized bioelectrical activation of the matter the brain consists of. Ordered bioelectric activation in time (over 100s of milliseconds) is thought to unify vast numbers of compound entities of matter. These complex organized patterns of unified compound experiential matter compose the subjective experience of the mind. Self-awareness is not the only type of real subjective experience (Descartes style), it is a special organization of the subjective experience inherent in ALL matter.

On this interpretation, the salvia experience is a profound disruption of the normal organization of bioelectrical activation of brain matter into truly novel orders and configurations of unified experience.

 

[killtheego]

Like, assuming that evolution managed to "invent" consciousness by designing brain structures that magically "generate" it, is when you think about it totally preposterous.

Evolution did not invent light. It did however invent eyeballs and retina's etc to take advantage of photons and their ability to interact with certain chemical and molecular structures in the retina. Likewise, it did not invent subjective consciousness, but it did invent the brain mechanism to capture, amplify and focus it, thus giving us our individual subjective "Qualia", and put it to use as a tool to vastly increase the odds of the transmission of the DNA.

So you're basically mixing Platonism and Dualism, by saying that the world of the mind or this "individual subjectiveness" existed prior to human beings. And then eventually our brains evolved enough for us to experience it?

I like it a lot, never thought of it that way tho.

 

[DwayneHoover]

So you're basically mixing Platonism and Dualism, by saying that the world of the mind or this "individual subjectiveness" existed prior to human beings. And then eventually our brains evolved enough for us to experience it?

I like it a lot, never thought of it that way tho.

Exactly.

A major life-changing book for me, that really caused my early psychedelic experiences to sort of "click into place" in terms of seeing what they were telling me was Alan Watt's brilliant little book, "The Book - On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Really Are"

Get it. Read it. It will leave you astonished, I promise.

He leads you through a series of easy to understand and follow thought experiments (based on the Indian system of Vedantism) that basically convince you that we ALL share the same "I" inside of us. Like, when you practice transcendental meditation and there is zero content in your awareness, no memories, no sensory impressions, there is still this "carrier wave" of self-consciousness that knows it is aware (and is aware that the only thing it is aware of at the moment is itself being aware of only itself)

That is your deepest inner "I". And its the SAME "I" inside the deepest level of everyone everywhere. One single constant eternal inner subjective "Being". Call it "God" if you want. THAT is what existed, alone and only to itself, before anything existed. THAT is what birthed the Big Bang. THAT is what our brains evolved to tune into, and fill with our individual concerns and feelings, and use for purposes of survival. But WE ARE REALLY ALL ONE AND THE SAME "I".

Or as Mark Twain put it at the finale to his final Novel "The Myterious Stranger" -

"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks - in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier."

"It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream - a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought - a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"​

 

[FreeLess]

I know I smoked some "100x" Salvia, shit was expensive as hell and worth it, but scarey at first.
since my first time I had smoked was like 4 years before and it was some 20x salvia and it did shit to me, i didn't think it would do anything big.
so i smoked a fat bowl from my "shotgun bowl" taking a huge hit as my cousin said I should do and held it in, and held it in.
While blowing out I thought the smoke would never stop coming out, and next thing I know it felt like a paper thin liquidy/plastic substance was slicing my upper torso from my bottom torso and next thing I know I fell over into sand, knowingly it was sand but it smelled of ash.
Then felt like wires connecting the back of my head, neck and spine to some conveyer belt where thousands of people with individual characteristics on their face and everything.
It was so fucking weird. Especially when a chess piece "queen" helped me up and told me to get "back in my place".
Second time after this, 3 days after cause I was spooked by the trip. Had some "80x" Salvia.
Smoked this shit same fucking way, I was determined to find out what was going on, didn't get a cutting feeling from my body this time thank god but I just out of no where fell off the chairs on the porch into a puddle, and when I stood up everything was wobbly and I was surrounded by an amazing amount of people all sitting at like school desks. and the one person who wasn't said "you need to get in place sir, please sit down" but this time when I was finally able to balance myself out, my vision zoomed out in like 3rd person and each of us had made up this huge head of some other 'super' being perhaps or just another person in reality? like if we're fucking brain cells or something.
i dont know, salvia is some shit thats for sure. they should make it cheaper though no lie >_>


*** Also to note on what DwayneHoover is saying above this post, that reminds me of that movie "What the Bleep do We Know? Down The Rabbit Hole" (extended version)
About how our subconscious (in everyone) is all connected to a super-universal conscious mind that some portray as 'god' or whatever you believe in, and a bunch of other crazy quantum physics cross multi-dimensional shit that made too much sense for my head to help me further my brain with drugs. woops. i lost track of making sense.
but i am about to go get that fucking book, it sounds like a blast.

 

[pbuilder]

the one flaw in this theory is that, if two people take the same salvia, in the same room, sitting on the same couch, staring ahead at the same thing, their trips will still differ.

If what they saw was true reality, they would see the same thing correct?

Where as, we all see the same thing while sober.

 

[Rorthron]

If what they saw was true reality, they would see the same thing correct?

Where as, we all see the same thing while sober.

We all see the color blue. It does not mean that "blue" exists. It does not. It's just a wave length band. Our minds and eye-receptors give it meaning by turning the photons with that wave length into a meaningful brain color stimulus. This goes on to say that just because we all see something (the consensual reality) does not mean that that reality actually exists.

This, by the way, goes much deeper than what I'm saying. "shared hallucination" is a better term than "reality"

 

[pbuilder]

We all see the color blue. It does not mean that "blue" exists. It does not. It's just a wave length band. Our minds and eye-receptors give it meaning by turning the photons with that wave length into a meaningful brain color stimulus. This goes on to say that just because we all see something (the consensual reality) does not mean that that reality actually exists.

This, by the way, goes much deeper than what I'm saying. "shared hallucination" is a better term than "reality"

Are you saying that my blue, could essentially be what you see as orange, or yellow? But because we are taught that, "this color" *teacher points at color*, is blue, that we all learn to identify as what we are taught each color to be as that color, although each person might actually be seeing it differently?

I've thought about this but, in reality, you're probably just smoking to much weed man.

 

[Rorthron]

Are you saying that my blue, could essentially be what you see as orange, or yellow? But because we are taught that, "this color" *teacher points at color*, is blue, that we all learn to identify as what we are taught each color to be as that color, although each person might actually be seeing it differently?

I've thought about this but, in reality, you're probably just smoking to much weed man.

:D No weed! And No, that's not what I meant. Photons can have different wave lengths. Among these infinite wave lengths our visual apparatus is able to perceive from 400 to 700 nm and what you perceive as blue is just a tiny interval (between 400 and 450 nm). Yet "blue" is not in the photons that reach our eyes in that wave length, they just have that property which is the wave length ot 1/frequency. The color is constructed in our brains and eyes. We provide the meaning from an ultimately meaningless physical phenomenon.

But as I said, this goes even deeper, into the nature of reality and into the proper existence of photons. Would they exist if no one could observe them? If you want to trip really hard, then read this article here